July 20, 2017

On average, employees have 10x more connections on social media than companies do. It makes sense, when you think about it: Each of your employees has their own extended network, including 2nd and 3rd degree connections.

The best way to reach this extended audience—sometimes the only way—is through your employees’ activity on social media. When your employees are trained brand advocates, they can bring your brand’s message to their networks. And the benefits go both ways: As employees become more active on social media, they can build their own professional brand and continue to grow their networks.

Employee advocacy is the marketing term for a strategic, goal-based program that encourages and empowers employee sharing on social media. In a formal employee advocacy program, your business curates content for employees to share

The right content mix is a crucial part of your employee advocacy program’s success. Our platform, LinkedIn Elevate, uses LinkedIn data and intelligent algorithms to help you curate content to meet your program’s goals.

Since we launched Elevate, thousands of LinkedIn members have used the platform to share content. We examined the data to see what types of content perform best for three common employee advocacy goals: employee participation, content engagement, and downstream business outcomes.

Content that Encourages Employee Participation

One baseline goal for employee advocacy is to compel employees to be more active on social media. It’s important to curate content that appeals to employees’ interests, so they will be genuinely motivated to share it with their networks. The right employee advocacy platform will allow you to create topic groups that employees can opt into, so they will see the most relevant content.

Our data shows that SlideShare presentations are the most popular type of content to share. In the past year, SlideShares received 44% more shares than any other content type. It’s likely that SlideShares are preferred because they can pack a great deal of useful information into a visually compelling, embeddable format. Employees are eager to share content that can educate their network and boost their own thought leadership, and SlideShares fit the bill.

Content that Encourages Engagement

Encouraging employee participation is the first part of the puzzle. The second is curating content that inspires engagement in your target audience. Content should be relevant to your industry and/or brand, but beware of being overly promotional. Focus on what will help your potential customers in their career and in their lives apart from your brand.

To foster maximum engagement—clicks, likes, comments, reshares—include video content in your mix. We saw that engagement on videos was 6x higher than for any other type of content. Videos saw 23% more reshares per impression, too. This is likely because video is more easily consumed than text, especially on mobile, and video posts tend to stand out in a feed and attract attention.

Content that Drives Business Outcomes

Employee advocacy has the potential to drive a number of different business outcomes. Your content mix should reflect the ongoing goals of your particular program. With the right data, you can continually refine your mix to address these goals. Here are a few possibilities:

Increase Company Page Views. Articles were the top performer for increasing company page views—3% more than any other type of content.

Increase Company Page Followers. For growing your audience, however, video content is the best bet. Videos resulted in 7% more company page follows per impression.

Expand Employee Networks. SlideShare presentations led the pack for increasing employee profile views and creating connections. Compared to other content types, SlideShares had 10% more profile views per impression and 2% more connections per impression.

Attract Talent. SlideShare presentations motivate audiences to view job postings, more than any other type of content. We found that SlideShares drove 46% more job postings views.

Employee advocacy is a powerful way to extend your brand’s reach, and boost your employees’ professional brands. With the right content mix, your program can empower employees, engage your audience, and drive tangible business outcomes. An employee advocacy program like LinkedIn Elevate can help you design and implement a sustainable, strategic program that achieves results for years to come.

Methodology: Data aggregated for all Elevate broadcasts and shares on LinkedIn from October 2016-March 2017 for the following types of content: articles, images, slideshares, and videos. Employee participation data is normalized by number of broadcasts to account for the types of content broadcasted more and less frequently. Engagement and outcome data is normalized by the number of impressions shares received to account for the types of content shared more and less frequently.